The page speed of your niche blog or website is a vital asset to not only your search engine rankings, but page loading speed also impacts your bounce rate, and how effective your site is. Case and point, if you are running a site or blog that takes 10-20 seconds to load, chances are you are losing all kinds of traffic. The main reason is because people are impatient and when your site or blog takes “forever” to load they go elsewhere.
If your site is heavily affiliate driven or relies on Google Adsense chances are you are suffering from slow page loading issues.
Lets face it, a site that isn't getting traffic due to slow page loading time and bounce rates, is going to be a complete waste of time. However, there are couple things you can do to make sure your page speed online is much faster.
Improve page loading time
1. Reduce WordPress plugins – Believe it or not, too much of a good thing is not good for your sites loading time. I know I have talked with Ileane about this and they are cool, but too much of a good thing isn't good for your blog or sites health. I know it can be tempting to have a lot of plugins on your WordPress blog (seeing how there are million out there), but try to use 10 or less plugins if you can.
2. Images – Use Adobe Photoshop to optimize your graphics. You can reduce the loading time considerably by optimizing your graphics. Quicker loading times make Google happy 🙂 Google actually factors your page loading time into their algorithm.
3. Avoid Pulling Graphics – What do I mean or have I lost my mind? Basically I mean don't have your graphics for a million different affiliate sites that pull from a different server. Instead save all the graphics and put them in the same location on your website (most importantly in the same directory). The more pulling from other sources will cause extra delays on your website.
4. Remove Pop-ups – I personally hate pop ups with a passion and I know there have to be others out there that agree with me. More often than not there are people that are like me and bounce when you have popups. These popups will increase your bounce rates big time. I know it is a good or let's say a decent strategy for building a list or an opt-in but if you care about your loading time I would avoid them.
How to test your page loading time
So what can be done to insure that you have the best loading time to making the big G happy? Go to http://tools.pingdom.com/ and put in your site's url. You will see a box that shows your loading time in seconds. Shoot for .0000001 seconds, but realistically under 3-4 seconds would be considered a good page loading time.
I am bad don't be like me! But anyways the cool thing is that Pingdom shows you all your images, scripts, etc. and how many kilobytes it is using. I got a ton of images (which I should tweak just a little to get loading time around 3 seconds) and various scripts so hence the long loading time, but try not to be like me and get that number down.
Last but not least, go with a hosting provider that is known for speedy page loading time. See my InMotion review for that because it lets you pick where you want your server to be located at for max speed. Really it works. Didn't really realize this until I switched from GoDaddy to InMotion. I think I let the world know this is my “Why I won't use GoDaddy again blog post :).
Note from Ileane: Google introduced a tool for testing Page Speed Online that will take it a step further and provide recommendations for what your site needs to improve page loading time http://pagespeed.googlelabs.com/
Share your thoughts on page loading time
Over to you, what other tips do you guys/girls have on getting a faster loading time? I would love to learn more and see what others are doing to increase their page loading times.